Iwill KK266Plus-R and MSI K7T Turbo-R Limited Edition

Review date: 14 August 2001.
Last modified
03-Dec-2011.

Via Technology's
KT133A
chipset is the ported and polished version of their original KT133.
It's a popular family; some KT133 variant powers most of the Socket A (Athlon
or Duron) motherboards in the world today.

The rest of the motherboard feature set ought to carry more weight for
most people. How overclockable the motherboard is, for instance, or whether
it has a second on-board IDE controller, or whether it's got built-in audio
or video. That sort of thing.

If you're looking for winners in all of these other departments, you
can find them powered by the KT133A. Here are a couple of high-spec KT133A
boards, at least one of which also cuts it in the high style department.

First, the greenish-yellow one.

Iwill's
KK266Plus-R
has about as many features as can be crammed into a KT133A board. There's
a RAID-capable
IDE controller on top of the standard two-port KT133A controller, so you
can plug in up to eight IDE devices (all of which can be running in Ultra
DMA/100 mode, if they support it) without needing to add a controller card,
and you can also do multi-drive array tricks, of which more shortly. And
this KK266 also has built-in sound that's several cuts above the average.

And now, the red one.

I was always under the impression that blackness
was what made computers faster, and that redness only worked for cars, but
MSI seem to disagree. Their named-like-a-sports-car
K7T Turbo-R Limited Edition is bright red.

If you're building a normal PC, your motherboard can be green, orange,
red, blue or purple with pink spots and it'll make no difference to anything.
If you're building a show-off box with neon illumination
and a window in the side, though, you may be feeling an urge to buy this
board already. It's unquestionably a lot snazzier looking than your usual
green or off-yellow item.

People who like some substance with their style will be pleased to learn
that the K7T Turbo Blah Blah Blah has a similar feature set to the KK266Plus-R.
Practically identical, in fact, except for plain vanilla built-in sound,
and the addition of an interesting USB networking option.

So let's bounce 'em off each other, shall we?

Extras

The KK266Plus-R comes with a couple of 80-wire IDE cables (which you
need, if you want to use Ultra DMA 66 or 100 hard drives at full speed),
a normal floppy cable, decent documentation, a driver/utility CD and a special
audio bracket, of which more in a moment.

The KK266 does not come with the cable and bracket you need to
use the second pair of USB ports which the motherboard supports. There are
two ports built into the normal ATX connector block on the back of the board,
but this board, like most others these days, can give you two more if you've
got the right gadget. Some motherboards give you said gadget in the box;
this one doesn't.

The K7T Turbo-R LE also has decent documentation too (including an unusually
complete paper manual in English, and a simplified manual in multiple languages),
but it stingily gives you only one 80 wire IDE lead in the bag with the
floppy lead, and also has no extra USB port bracket included.

Well, no normal one.

Instead, you get a weird-looking USB whatsit whose back panel bracket
has one type A USB socket (the rectangular ones) and one type B socket (the
squarer variety), with cables coming from each socket that terminate in
the same sort of plug that normal extra-port boards use.

This funny looking thing gives you one normal extra USB port - that's
what the A socket is for. The B socket is for the K7T Turbo's USB PC to
PC Networking function.

Once you've plugged the end of the internal cable into this "USB2" header
on the motherboard ("USB1" is present too; that's where you plug in a normal
two-more-ports thingy, if you've got one) you can use a standard USB A-to-B
cable (one is included) to connect a machine built around the K7T Turbo-R
to a Type A USB port on any other PC.

Then, you install the included "GenieLink" driver software on both PCs,
and presto, the USB cable is a network connection.

It won't quite have the performance of 100BaseT Ethernet, but it doesn't
require any special hardware on the other computer, and the five metre maximum
USB cable length should give you decent positioning flexibility.

There's also bridge software supplied, which lets you connect the USB-linked
computers to a regular LAN. To do this, you'll need to install a normal
network adapter in the K7T Turbo-R machine as well.

While we're on the subject of unusual extras, MSI's included one of their
standard nifty features on the K7T Turbo.

This little line of "D-LEDs" replaces the usual cryptic startup beep
codes that most motherboards use to tell you when something's not right
with the basic system setup. The LEDs are all bi-colour - they can light
up red or green - and they light up in different patterns while the system
starts up, and settle down to all green when the power-up process is complete.

You still need to refer to the motherboard documentation to find out
what the codes mean, mind you, and they're no use to you when the lid's
on the computer case. But they're still handier than beeps, which is why
MSI keep using them on this and other MSI boards, like the older 6330 I
review here.

If beeps do matter to you, by the way, the K7T Turbo-R LE has
a little built-in speaker as well, which doesn't seem to be mentioned in
the manual. So you don't have to connect the case speaker if you don't want
to.

Memory

Both of these boards have three slots for standard SDR DIMM memory modules,
and can accept up to 1.5Gb of RAM - three 512Mb modules.

512Mb DIMMs are still rather expensive per megabyte compared with smaller
capacity modules, but 256Mb PC133 modules are currently selling for only
about 1.5 times the price of similar quality 128Mb modules. With all
SDRAM prices at rather attractive levels now, it's thus no big deal to get
768Mb of RAM onto either of these boards.

Which is a heck of a lot more than most people need, of course. But if
you're doing RAM-hungry things like pro graphics or video work, heavy multitasking,
manipulation of giant databases or simulating a
brutal gladiatorial spectacle,
getting slabs of RAM on the cheap has never been easier.

It'd be nice if these boards had a fourth RAM slot, allowing 1Gb of RAM
without forcing you to get a pricey 512Mb module. But most people are unlikely
to care. 256Mb is more than enough for most of the world's Windows PCs.

Sound

Both of these boards have on-board sound, but the KK266's is rather more
spectacular than the K7T Turbo's.

In the olden days of, oh, about a week ago last Thursday, sound hardware
built into motherboards was not a great thing. It often used cheap and nasty
chipsets that might or might not work properly with whatever OS you wanted
to use, and which were sometimes cantankerous about stepping aside when
you tried to install a proper sound card instead.

These days, built-in-audio motherboards are a pretty safe bet, as long
as you don't want anything all that special. The K7T Turbo's setup is par
for the course, with three standard 1/8th inch connectors on the back panel
(line out, line in, mic in), and four-pin connectors on the board for up
to three internal audio sources, like the analogue output from a CD-ROM
drive.

If you want hardware accelerated positional audio and similar frills
then you won't get 'em; this is just the normal Via 686B AC97-compliant
sound package. But it'll serve, it saves you some money that you'd otherwise
have to spend on a sound card, and it can be easily disabled if you want
to upgrade.

The KK266, on the other hand, has audio as one of its prime selling points.
It has, as standard, a C-Media CMI8738
MX sound chip, which is an all-singing, all-dancing, all-features unit that
should please gamers, home cinema enthusiasts and people who want to use
their PC as a dirt cheap audio workstation.

If all you care about is positional audio for games, the CMI8738 should
do nicely. It supports DirectSound 3D and A3D 1.0 for positional audio,
and EAX 2.0 for environmental effects; for best results, just plug in your
headphones and you'll be away.

If you want more outputs, though, the KK266Plus-R can oblige. It has
the same three built in sound input and output connectors as the KT7 Turbo,
and every other ATX motherboard with built in sound. But the KK266 also
comes with an extra sound output bracket which you can install in any empty
slot location on the back of your case. The bracket has two more 1/8th inch
sockets on it. One of these connectors gives you rear (surround) speaker
output, and the other one provides the centre and subwoofer channels, bringing
the total up to a full home-theatre-compliant five-point-one channels.

The centre speaker output is on one channel of that last stereo connector,
and the subwoofer output's on the other channel. You can move a couple of
jumpers to select which "side" each output's on.

Any software that supports the CMI8738 chipset will work in 5.1 channel
mode with the KK266's audio output. You don't get any DVD playing software
with the board, but that's not a problem, since you often do get
such software with DVD-ROM drives and video cards. CyberLink's popular
PowerDVD is probably the most frequently bundled DVD player packages
(many hardware enthusiasts end up with several copies...), and it supports
the CMI8738.

If you want digital inputs and outputs, the CMI8738 can do that too -
but to get the actual connectors to do it, you need to buy an optional "SuperAudio"
bracket to replace the standard one. The SuperAudio bracket has the same
two 1/8th inch sockets as the plain bracket, but also gives you two RCA
S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) connectors, and two optical ("Toslink")
connectors. Each connector pair has one input and one output.

The only thing I found to dislike at all about the KK266's audio is the
cheesy standard mixer interface...

...that comes with the driver install.

Which, by the way, asks you whether you want to install the outdated
7.1a version of DirectX, and then does it anyway when you say no.

The Advanced options panels for the KK266's sound configuration have
a normal Windows look, thankfully, and let you fiddle with various features.
This is where you tell the audio system what sound output setup you've got
- two speakers, four speakers, six speakers or headphones - and set the
levels for the different channels.

There's a "virtual 5.1 speakers" option that uses Head Related Transfer
Function (HRTF) jiggery-pokery to make fake surround out of two channel
output, and you can also set volume control hot-keys so you can change the
Windows volume level while you're playing a game.

If you've got the SuperAudio add-on, you can toggle S/PDIF loopback -
where whatever comes in the input goes out of the output as well. You can
also monitor the S/PDIF input, sending the S/PDIF audio signal out of the
analogue outputs. There's toggleable "Copyright Protection", which I presume
allows you to decide whether you want the audio hardware to pay attention
to SCMS (Serial Copying
Management System) data or not. You can also toggle whether you want
your S/PDIF sample rate to be 44.1 or 48kHz.

Drive connectors

For most people's purposes, these two motherboards have identical IDE-drive-connecting
capabilities - but they are actually different.

The first two IDE connectors on each board are run by the KT133A's standard
IDE hardware, which has full UDMA/100 capability. But the two boards have
different controllers for the second two connectors.

The K7T Turbo-R has a Promise controller.
Promise are the leading brand in the basic-IDE-RAID market, and their controllers
generally have fewer... issues... than the
Highpoint Technologies controllers
on many four-connector boards. This Promise controller is a PDC20265R with
a "Lite RAID" BIOS, which can apparently be
tweaked, if you're feeling
brave, to give it more features.

The KK266Plus-R's second IDE controller isn't a Highpoint, either; it's
an American Megatrends (AMI) AG 80649.

The K7T Turbo-R LE has its second pair of IDE connectors down here in
the corner of the board, which is unusual, and good. Multi-connector motherboards
with all of the connectors in the usual spot near the RAM slots - like the
KK266, and pretty much every other dual-controller motherboard - can be
annoying to set up; you tend to get a cable snarl.

Here's the KK266's drive connectors, which have exactly this problem.
It's not tremendously difficult to get all five cables in place on
a board like this, but it's something I wouldn't mind never having to do
again.

Connectors down in the corner can be a problem if you want to hook them
up to UDMA/66 or UDMA/100 drives in the top of a tower case, because 80
wire IDE leads can only be 40 centimetres long. If you've got drive bays
within range of the connectors, though, the K7T's arrangement is an elegant
one.

Both of these controllers let you connect up to four separate IDE drives
of any type, just like the standard IDE connectors, if you don't want to
use any RAID features. They also support the same two basic two-drive RAID
modes (well, unless you've been fooling with the Promise controller's BIOS).
RAID 0 is non-redundant striping, which adds the capacities of identical
drives together, but at the cost of one drive failure killing the whole
array's data. RAID 1 is mirroring, where the data on one drive is duplicated
on another drive, for security.

The KK266's RAID controller also supports RAID 0+1, which is both modes
together, with the speed of striping and the security of mirroring. You
need four drives to use it, but at least you can; for some reason
the K7T's Promise controller doesn't support 0+1, unless you fiddle the
BIOS. Frankly, I think Promise are asking for people to do these
"back door updates", when they cripple their entry level controllers this
badly.

Both of these boards can be had in slightly cheaper versions that lack
the second pair of IDE connectors. The price difference is small enough,
though, that a lot of distributors probably won't bother carrying both versions.
If you only need four or fewer drives and don't want the boot delay the
extra controller causes, you can just turn it off in the BIOS setup.

Slots

The KK266 has a standard slot complement for a modern motherboard - one
AGP, six PCI. Good luck installing a card in every PCI slot and ending up
with them all playing together, but at least you can try.

At the end of these modern slots, though, there's a throwback to days
of yore - an ISA slot, sharing a back panel connector with PCI slot number
6. If you've got an old ISA card that you don't want to replace with something
newer, or if your old ISA card is some oddity that you can't replace
with a PCI unit, then the KK266 will let you keep using it. It's becoming
difficult to find high performance motherboards with even one ISA slot,
so this one feature could make the KK266Plus-R a must-have for some buyers.

Lots of motherboards have some kind of other slot at the end of
their PCI collection, though. It's just not usually good for anything much.
Take the last slot on the K7T Turbo-R, for instance.

Once again - one AGP (this time with a card-retaining clip that engages
the slot on the back of your video card), plus six PCI. Plus one little
CNR (Communications Network Riser) slot at the end, into which you can plug
a few super-cheap host-based modem or network cards, which aren't available
in retail channels because they're not enough cheaper than PCI alternatives
that people assembling fewer than a hundred computers should care.

Other headers

While we're in the stuff-not-many-people-use department, both motherboards
also have
Wake-On-LAN,
Wake-On-Modem and IrDA headers, and the
KK266 has an SMBUS connector as well.

The K7T Turbo-R has a reasonably straightforward case connector pin block,
where you hook up your case's lights and switches. But the KK266 could be
a bit friendlier in this department.

Here's its case connector pins. Even the best labelled of these things
tend to be annoying, especially for new users, but the KK266 manual goes
out of its way to confuse you. There's no simple this-connector-goes-here
diagram; instead you get a picture of the pin-block with its pin numbering
scheme indicated, and a table with the pin numbers on which different connectors
fit. Count to the right pins yourself.

Oh, yeah - don't expect simple "+" and "-" annotations, either. Iwill
know what an anode and a cathode are, and expect you to know as well.

(Crib notes for the embarrassed: The anode is the positive, the cathode
is the negative. When a case connector has a white wire and a coloured wire,
the coloured wire should be the positive one. If you connect a case connector
switch lead - like power or reset - backwards, it ought to work fine. If
you connect a case connector LED lead - like the power or hard drive light
- backwards, it won't work, but it won't be harmed either. Just reverse
the connector and the LED will start doing its thing.)

Another thing that irked me mildly about the KK266Plus-R, while I'm venting,
was that my review board came with its built-in USB ports disabled in the
BIOS.

I've seen motherboards that come with some (or all!) of their IDE channels
set to "None" in the BIOS, which can have newbies playing where-the-heck-is-my-drive
games for some time. But disabled USB is a new one on me.

It's the work of a moment to go into the BIOS setup and fix the problem,
once you know it's there. But given the number of other USB hassles
that have been known to happen on Via-chipset Windows PCs, "the controller's
turned off" was not the first thing that sprang to my mind.

On the plus side, important jumpers on the KK266, like the Clear CMOS
one here, have these nifty tall yellow jumper blocks with a pull-tab. The
CCMOS jumper on most motherboards has a plain hard-to-grab jumper on it;
that's all you get on the MSI board. Some boards just have a couple of solder
pads that you have to bridge with a screwdriver. An illuminated toggle switch
with "Better luck on the next overclocking attempt!" written on it in cheery
letters would be better still, but I'll settle for these jumpers that I
can easily use.

Overclocking

Performance-wise, all KT133A boards are pretty much precisely the same,
provided they can get their CPU and other components up to the same speed.
Whether they can do this depends partly on the adjustment options provided,
and partly on the physical design of the board - running at higher-than-specified
speeds requires better-than-standard motherboard design.

Both of these boards have imposing CPU power supply sections, with big
smoothing capacitors and multiple regulators. They also both keep the big
caps away from the CPU socket, so overclockers should be able to use pretty
much any giant air cooler on their CPU without it fouling any other components.

Both of these boards support CPU multiplier and voltage adjustment (up
to 1.85V on both boards, in 0.025 volt increments) and Front Side Bus (FSB)
adjustment as well (both of them give you more adjustment range than you'll
be able to use, in 1MHz increments). Both of them also let you tweak these
settings in software, using the BIOS setup program.

They also both have hardware monitoring capabilities, so you can track
fan speeds and your CPU temperature. Since Socket A CPUs before the "Palomino"
core Athlons don't have an internal thermal sensor, motherboards have to
use an external sensor, which is usually just a little thermal probe sitting
on the motherboard in the middle of the CPU socket.

The KK266's CPU temperature probe is a standard blue-blob unit, but the
K7T has this super-thin flexible probe. I've no idea whether it'll actually
work better; I doubt it, to be honest, because all motherboard CPU thermal
sensors I've seen are useful only for vague comparative readings. They never
give you much of an idea about the processor's real core temperature, and
you can't compare readings across different motherboards, even if they're
boards of the same model. Small differences in probe positioning can make
big differences to the temperature it detects, and the calibration of the
probes on some motherboards has been known to change dramatically between
BIOS versions.

A feature that'll matter more to overclockers is that neither of these
motherboards have completely software-based CPU speed configuration.
Like many other KT133 boards, these two each have one jumper that you'll
need to check, whether or not you want to overclock your CPU. That one jumper
selects the base FSB the board uses - 100 or 133MHz.

By default, older Socket A Athlons and all Durons use a 100MHz FSB. An
800MHz Duron, for instance, has an 8X multiplier as standard; eight times
100 is 800.

Newer Athlons with the "C" designation use a 133MHz FSB. They'll work
at 100MHz, but won't run at full speed. If you have the FSB jumper set to
100MHz and plug in, say, a 1.33GHz Athlon (which will want to run at 133MHz
FSB with its stock 10X multiplier), you'll find that it only runs at 1GHz
- ten times 100MHz.

The problem arises when you're trying to overclock a chip that has a
100MHz stock FSB, and run it at 133MHz FSB, on one of these motherboards
that sets the base FSB with a jumper but has all of the other adjustments
in software.

If you've unlocked the CPU multiplier - some Athlons and Durons come
with an unlocked multiplier from the factory, but all of 'em can be easily
unlocked at home, via the method I explain in my older Socket A motherboard
comparison here - then you can use a 133MHz FSB
on a chip made for 100MHz, even if that chip's core can't actually handle
a 33% overclock. You just reduce the multiplier a bit when you wind up the
FSB, so that instead of running at its stock speed of, say, 10X100MHz, it
now runs at, say, 9X133MHz.

9X133MHz will give you a 1.2GHz CPU (not 1197MHz, because "133MHz" is
actually 133 and a third megahertz). You'd get the same core speed by using
12X100MHz. But the higher FSB, lower multiplier option gives the CPU faster
communication with the rest of the system, importantly including the RAM,
for somewhat better overall performance.

If you're shooting for really high core speeds, you have
to use 133MHz or higher FSB speeds, because the multipliers only go up to
13X. Which, confusingly, is what you get when you ask for 12.5X.

As has been noted
elsewhere, though, this can cause a problem. KT133A motherboards with
a 100/133 jumper will always start up at whatever FSB the jumper's set to,
which is fine. But at the very start of the boot process, they use the CPU's
default multiplier - not the lower one you've set in the BIOS configuration.
Which can be bad, if you're using a 100MHz FSB CPU that can't run, even
for a moment, at its default multiplier from a 133MHz FSB.

The motherboard sets the multiplier to the software-configured setting
only a little way into the startup process, but it'll never get there if
the CPU locks on power-up.

If you're starting out with a C-type Athlon, of course, this doesn't
matter. It'll work, no worries. And, as
this Anandtech piece
notes, you can also get around the problem by lowering your CPU's apparent
default multiplier. Your average casual overclocker's unlikely to be crazy
about all of that fiddly chip-scribbling, though.

The way around this problem is to opt for a motherboard that has all
of its CPU settings in software. Or, at least, one which allows you to turn
off "jumper free" mode and set the CPU up with nothing but old fashioned
jumpers and/or DIP switches.

This latter option's definitely not preferable. Hardware CPU setup is
fiddly and annoying, and it just can't give you the squillions of setup
options that software setup can deliver. Well, not unless someone makes
a hardware setup motherboard with dozens of DIP switches, anyway.

High FSB speeds mean a hot motherboard north bridge chip. The K7T Turbo-R
has a simple orange-anodised heat sink on its north bridge, and the KK266
I got for review had a shiny-plated passive heat sink there. But the Iwill
board also came with this fancier active cooler in the box. Apparently Iwill
will be providing these as standard equipment, to help overclockin' fools
get their FSB up into the stratosphere.

Bear in mind, though, that a redlined 160-odd-megahertz FSB is only 20%
higher than the stock 133MHz, and a 20% increase in bandwidth to the RAM
and to anything else that's goosed up by the FSB change will not
make a big difference for most things that most people do with most PCs.
Like games, for instance.

If you've got good enough RAM and other components that 160MHz FSB runs
rock solid, go ahead; it's not going to make anything slower. But
FSB tweaking is only of minor interest when CPU multiplier adjustment is
also available.

The MSI board comes with their "Fuzzy Logic 3" software for Windows,
which is supposed to automatically pick the fastest stable FSB speed. Heck,
it might even do it. But this is still just FSB overclocking; you can do
a lot better by unlocking your CPU multiplier and doing it properly.

If you'd like some RAM tweaking to go with your overclocking, the K7T
provides a "High System Performance" option in the BIOS that sets the RAM
Column Address Strobe latency to 2. This can give a small performance gain
in RAM-intensive tasks, but does nothing noticeable for most tasks and may
not be supported by your RAM.

There's also four-way memory interleaving, activated by default when
you use the standard "DRAM Timing by SPD" option in the K7T's BIOS. Interleaving
spreads memory access over different modules - actually, it can spread it
over different sides of the one module, since, electrically, double-sided
modules are two separate units. Interleaving can give a worthwhile speed
boost for some tasks, but, again, you shouldn't expect miracles. It's very
unlikely to cause compatibility problems, at least.

The KK266 has explicit RAM timing and interleave configuration options;
it wins by a hair in this department. Though, as you ought to have figured
out by now, that's not likely to make a lot of difference to anything in
the real world. A DDR motherboard with no memory tweaks applied ought to
handily defeat an SDR board with every tweak in creation, for any task that
leans heavily on main memory speed.

Overall

Here in Australia, and in a few other smaller PC markets as well, you
still can't get quality DDR memory for around the same price as quality
SDR. In the USA, you can.

Since the real world performance difference between DDR and SDR is generally
small, there's good reason to settle for an SDR motherboard if you can't
get decent DDR memory cheaply. There are a few "dual fuel" motherboards
which can accept either kind of RAM - I review one
here - which let you start with one kind of memory then upgrade to the
other later. But they're more expensive.

In countries where DDR is as dirt cheap as SDR, though - or for people
who are happy to take their chances with importing their own RAM - the choice
is less clear-cut. There's a good selection of DDR-only motherboards now
with big feature sets, and you might as well get the extra speed, if there's
nothing else you need.

If RAM flavour considerations aren't first on your list of selection
priorities, then both of these boards are great.

The K7T Turbo-R Limited Edition is exactly what the doctor ordered, if
you want a really eye-catching KT133A motherboard with an imposingly complete
feature set, and USB networking thrown in. Got a laptop with no network
adapter and don't want to pay for a PCMCIA one? This board could be just
right for your next desktop machine.

The KK266Plus-R's core feature set is very similar to the K7T's. Its
special feature is its high-powered built-in sound, which is likely to be
interesting to the home theatre and home audio studio enthusiasts out there.
The SuperAudio add-on's not terribly expensive, and it gives you a full
set of digital ins and outs more cheaply than you could get them from any
stand-alone sound card.

For mainstream users, both of these boards have more features than you
need, but they're not terribly expensive, so who cares? For overclockers,
they're both great. Not perfect, but certainly not much of a compromise.

If all you want is a basic business box, both of these boards are complete
overkill. Consider a cheap all-in-one board instead, like the Asus A7VL-VM
I review here.

For more demanding purposes, though, these boards both get the Recommended
stamp from me!

Buy a motherboard!
Aus PC Market don't sell these boards any more, but they've got
plenty of others!(if you're not in Australia or New Zealand,
Aus PC Market won't deliver to you. If you're in the USA, try a price search
at
DealTime!)